Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer. This is culled from a recent article by her on masks and the Virus.
"This isn’t a matter of protecting children, their teachers, or their grandparents; it’s delusional and dangerous cultlike behavior.
When it comes to masking kids in schools, the global scientific community has launched no such studies during the pandemic.
If it works, it merely delays an inevitable brush with COVID, and is therefore unnecessary; if it doesn’t work (and the impossibility of children maintaining a proper fit and seal for hours on end suggests it can’t), it is simply a piece of public health theater whose side-effects are likely to be severe, and is therefore unnecessary.
A (pre-vaccine!) analysis from Germany shows that if a child is infected with COVID—with or without preexisting conditions—there is an 8 in 100,000 chance of going to the intensive care unit. According to the same study, the risk of death is 3 in 1 million, with no deaths reported in the over-5 age group. These risks are astonishingly low.
In all of human history, we have never masked so many children for so many hours a day for so many years. As such, we have very little data from which to draw lessons. We simply do not know the long-term impacts of this evidence-free intervention.
While the assertion is often made that masking kids is a form of unselfish behavior—and that those who oppose it are the real selfish ones because they put others at risk—the data appears to support the opposite conclusion.
Masking is now little more than an appealing delusion.
But most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus. The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.
Less forgivable is the decision we’ve made as a society to shift the anxieties of adults onto the youngest members of society, who count on us to defend their interests before our own.
While we purportedly do it to protect other age groups, empirical analysis suggests, for instance, that school closures in a given community have done nothing to slow the spread among the elderly in the same community.
When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most."
"This isn’t a matter of protecting children, their teachers, or their grandparents; it’s delusional and dangerous cultlike behavior.
When it comes to masking kids in schools, the global scientific community has launched no such studies during the pandemic.
If it works, it merely delays an inevitable brush with COVID, and is therefore unnecessary; if it doesn’t work (and the impossibility of children maintaining a proper fit and seal for hours on end suggests it can’t), it is simply a piece of public health theater whose side-effects are likely to be severe, and is therefore unnecessary.
A (pre-vaccine!) analysis from Germany shows that if a child is infected with COVID—with or without preexisting conditions—there is an 8 in 100,000 chance of going to the intensive care unit. According to the same study, the risk of death is 3 in 1 million, with no deaths reported in the over-5 age group. These risks are astonishingly low.
In all of human history, we have never masked so many children for so many hours a day for so many years. As such, we have very little data from which to draw lessons. We simply do not know the long-term impacts of this evidence-free intervention.
While the assertion is often made that masking kids is a form of unselfish behavior—and that those who oppose it are the real selfish ones because they put others at risk—the data appears to support the opposite conclusion.
Masking is now little more than an appealing delusion.
But most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus. The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.
Less forgivable is the decision we’ve made as a society to shift the anxieties of adults onto the youngest members of society, who count on us to defend their interests before our own.
While we purportedly do it to protect other age groups, empirical analysis suggests, for instance, that school closures in a given community have done nothing to slow the spread among the elderly in the same community.
When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most."
(This is not continuous; it is excerpted.)
This opinion will not be picked up right away because it attacks a basic human--and particularly Progressive--myth: the ability we have to assess problems with clarity and the scientific righteousness of good ideas.
Eventually, this opinion will bleed into the popular press and the pronouncements of the government over the next while will morph and become the new gospel, with all opposing positions ridiculed and blamed on Trump.
So, in the middle of the Hate Season, as crowds gather to denounce Eurasia, the elites switch our enemy to Eastasia.
1 comment:
Most people are Delusional how else could the exist ?
Masking children is merely another type of Delusion.
Post a Comment